Growing Up Together

Affordable Comfort, Incorporated (now ACI) began its life when very few of us knew what a blower door was. Today ACI plays a pivotal role in promoting the home performance profession.

Home Energy magazine and ACI have grown up together. Home Energy published its first issue in 1984, while ACI held its first conference in 1986. There has been much collaboration among the staff of the two organizations, and often the hopes, dreams, and challenges have been shared as well. Speaking out of our collective memories, we remember when no one knew what a blower door was. Speaking from our collective hopes, we wish more people used them. In the beginning, remembers Linda Wigington, one of ACI’s founders and currently its manager for program design and development, ACI asked, “How can we as a society provide people with affordable and comfortable homes?” The big challenge at the time, says Wigington, was expanding on the engineered solutions that went something like, “If you install 100,000 widgets, then you get a certain amount of energy efficiency, and that solves the problem.” The idea that you could diagnose a home the way a doctor diagnoses a patient, and use applied building science to come up with the best solution to that home’s comfort, efficiency, durability, and safety problems, was not yet in vogue. But that attitude has shifted as ...